It also uses the same directory structure, the exe lives in steamapps\common\counter strike global offensive\
That's because in previous CS games there's always a chunk of the community that wants to stay behind for whatever reason. Valve doesn't want anyone on CS:GO anymore, so they just updated all copies to CS2.
For what it's worth Dota 2 lives in \Dota 2 beta\ because they didn't want people to redownload the game after launch, and probably didn't want to break things by messing with paths for cosmetic reasons.
Oh wow interesting, so you can’t play cs:go anymore? IMO this is a good idea as the community didn’t want to move to source a while back (it was a bad game tho)
Not even remotely close. OW2 introduced a battle pass riddled with dark patterns, removed all passive cosmetics collection while focusing on pushing cosmetics, changed gameplay balanced haphazardly for the worse to justify the "2" in the name, and the playerbase saw these hostile actions for what they are.
CS2 does exactly none of these things and instead keeps the gameplay and social contract largely unchanged. Gameplay issues with smokes have finally been addressed, the game renderer has been modernized, and the playerbase reaction is overwhelmingly positive.
>the playerbase reaction is overwhelmingly positive.
Looking at reddit, it doesn't look like it, but that's just reddit.
I don't like it too. It's just a worse-looking, worse-performing game. The gamemodes and maps I liked are gone too.
This is on Fedora with Flatpak Steam, latest stable kernel/Mesa.
Performance does need some work; when I manage to get it to actually ignore vsync (hence ~160 FPS), my frame times are all over the place - with a 7950X3D and 6900XT.
It's a little quirky indeed, as the newer version completely shuts out part of the player base: If you try to launch CS:GO on Mac, it automatically deletes itself and updates to CS2. Then it tells you that it can't run, because cs2.exe can't be found.
I had the same issue on Linux 4 hours ago, and then got a 37 GB update which fixed it. I think the update is just rolling out slower than the library page change that tells it to launch cs2.sh
This is as annoying as the Amazon listings that switch products. How am I supposed to know if the ratings and reviews are related to the new game or the old one?
Agreed, but it seems like they didn't want to split the community again - people are still playing the original Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source as well and I suppose they didn't want people sticking with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as well.
I wish I could get into this game, but I just can't. The difficulty curve isn't so much a curve as a wall (see also Dota 2) and there's weird (to me) things like you can't change ADS to "hold the right mouse button" instead of "click the right mouse button". The most I can do in it is play against some very dumb bots.
Hope it's a nice upgrade for the people who enjoy it! Good to see it has a native Linux build as well (I know all Valve games do, but in my experience native builds don't always work as well as the Windows versions under Proton).
Edit: I installed it and lo and behold they have an option to make aiming a hold vs toggle. Now the only barrier is my incredible lack of talent and skill.
getting better at this game requires fundamental lessons that are hard to communicate (like counter-strafing, how important it is to have good aim AND good movement). AKA level 1
and then there's the teamwork aspect (comms, strats, etc...) aka level 2
and then there's the game sense (counter-stratting, countering opponents bad habits) aka level 3
honestly the wall can be less intimidating if you work on your mechanics (level 1), which is the base of all of this
I probably wouldn't get past level 1! Despite playing FPS for decades at this point I've never been able to develop super accurate aiming. I'm good enough for vs CPU games (usually) but against humans I end up with around 5-10% accuracy.
I used to have this problem, thinking I just can't get accurate in FPS's. Then I read that your mouse sensitivity should generally be around 30-60 cm movement to do a 360 rotation.
Mine was more in the area of 5-10 cm for a single rotation (so that I could use just my wrist for movements), which is almost impossible to properly aim with.
The idea is to do movements with your whole arm and micro-adjustments with your wrist. It's annoying and weird at first, but after getting used to it your accuracy gets an order of magnitude better.
Not sure if that's your case, but thought I'd share if others had this problem.
I always thought I played normal, but I needed this to be pointed out to me.
If no one has ever seen an e-sports player's physical movements, They have very light mice (under 75g), a mouse pad about 1m (3ft) long and move their whole arm left and right to turn their character 180 degrees while using just their wrist and flexing their fingers to fine tune the cursor onto the head for a headshot.
Here's how to improve:
First, start reducing your mouse sensitivity by 1.5 total percent each day. This is so the change is gradual enough that you can keep playing games like normal, but you'll have brought your sensitivity down to a more manageable level. This will also give your body time to build new muscles in your arm that you'll be using for holding your arm out and moving your mouse (you don't tend to use these muscles in anything else during the day. Don't try to skip to the end even if you're fit, because you'll over exert some specific muscles in your arms that you don't use because they're hidden under other muscles).
Once you're at the point where you comfortably need to move your mouse about 60cm (2ft) to perform a 180 in-game, you should start looking at aim-training. There are aim-training games that will teach you how to flick, track, etc... (If you're not exactly sure what these are, you will learn by watching some in-trainer tutorial videos) Aim-trainers are a lot more focused and intense specifically on aiming compared to regular games which means you build up specific skills in them much faster than regular games.
Spend about 10-15 minutes a day in the aim trainer right before playing your games. This will train you, but also warm you up so you're already playing well when you move to an actual game. The aim-trainer will track your performance and you'll notice it gradually trend upwards bit by bit for about 6 weeks.
By this point, you're probably better in some ways than the average player. But you're still going to get demolished by a few specific people you'll run into online.
To start facing those players, you'll be able to go into your aim-trainer (which has recorded all of your stats so far) and see which specific skills you need to practice.
Does the game provide a button when you actually need to turn around, or do you have to pick up the mouse three times since the mouse pad is not 2 feet wide?
Players do not have a button to turn around, they need to pick up the mouse quickly. Here's why that ends up being better:
There are two options:
1. Have one wide arm movement that turns the player 180 degrees, meaning that when the mouse is centred, the player can turn left or right by 90 degrees without lifting their mouse.
2. Have one wide arm movement that turns the player 360 degrees, meaning that when the mouse is centred, the player can turn left or right by 180 degrees without lifting their mouse.
Different players test each option and all available statistics are measured.
Turns out that option 1 performs much better than option 2.
For FFA (Free for all) games, having a reduced turn, also means that the player is more accurate. In a one on one fight, players with reduced-turn are able to consistently get more headshots (which deal much more damage then other shots) leading to winning more fights. This allows them to charge forwards into and out of fights, as it is unlikely for an enemy to be behind them since they had just cleared that area of enemies by previously charging into it.
For Team games, having a reduced turn still gives you the greater accuracy, but you're less likely to charge in since an enemy team can surround you and hit you in the back. This leads to teams of reduced-turn players remaining near each other in formation. If an enemy enters any player's field of view, they are able to kill that enemy faster since they can consistently get more headshots, protecting the whole team. If an entire enemy team appears together, the reduced turn team will still win because they can still get more headshots consistently. This tends to result in the enemy team breaking formation, allowing the reduced turn team to also break formation charging each enemy. The reduced turn team will then form back up into formation when they enemy team is close to regrouping.
Serious players buy 2 feet wide mouse pads I'm not joking (no there is not a turn around button). Yes you will see people pick up there mice sometimes. Most people setup up their sensitivity so that they can do a single 360 going from left to right edge of mouse pad and then buy large pads. Keep in mind in game you're using WASD movement in a correspondingly twitchy way and are actively avoiding putting yourself in a situation where you need to 180 quickly. It's part of the meta.
This also helped me improve quite a lot. Though there are two types of aim which benefit from different sensitivities. Tracking aim, which is what you’d use with weapons which require multiple hits to kill like SMGs or beam weapons. You’re tracking the player with your aim as you move. Lower sensitivity really helps here. Flick aiming is typically used for sniper rifles with one hit kill capabilities. You’re not really aiming so much as relying on your reflexes and experience to snap off an instant shot. Think of those crazy 360 no scope shots. These can benefit from a higher sensitivity than tracking.
Unless you’re playing a game where you’re literally just using a beam weapon, you’ll likely switch between these aim modes frequently and naturally throughout a game and having multiple sensitivities that you switch between can really fuck up your “intuitive” feel when aiming. In those cases I try to find a happy medium. Something a bit higher than optimal for tracking but usable for flicking.
People use different sensitivity. I remember downloading some famous players configs back on 1.6 and some of them had a tiny one and it was basically impossible to do a 180 haha. Some of them were way too extreme imo. But yeah lower sensitivity is a good improvement
Honestly aim only goes so far. A lot of it's knowing crosshair placement (ie: aiming where someone would be around the corner) and comfort with moving.
It helps to know rough timings for where conflicts first happen. You can filter out a lot of this posturing by having a sense of where the other team should be, given timing
For example, in B-tunnels on dust2 in CS:GO and 2. With a decent spawn point, the opposing teams meet at the stairs - favoring whoever was slightly closer. It may be best to simply post up, or push through
I've always been a mediocre shot compared to my peers, but my gamesense and calm nature has made me super useful on invitational teams
If you're into it, just work on consistency - the rest will follow
Another pro move is to aim on the wall where you crosshair will meet the target after you straff. So you aim at the wall, move left and now you’re aiming at the correct position without having had to move your crosshair, then move your crosshair again to the wall, rinse and repeat.
Indeed, a key part of this crosshair placement is 'prefiring' - knowing you're about to shoot before peeking.
The time-to-kill is rather low, the victor is [usually] who prepared the most - not who has the best natural aim.
I decide where I go each round by my spawn point - that's one of the easiest advantages you can have; knowing which allows you to beat the other team to a position/setup.
Once that initial fun is over, it's mostly about keeping a mental model of where the other team 'should be', and preparing for that.
Public games are a wild animal, you lose a lot of this 'reasoning' when it's no longer 5v5 or some reasonable number.
You generally assume a 2-1-2 split on the left/mid/right 'lanes' of the map; but some teams may stack when economically challenged. Many pistols beat one/two rifles, and can turn the round around!
Agree with these points, but at 1.5 I'd insert: intimate knowledge of the maps. "Holding angles" is such a profound advantage, and requires knowing the maps inside-and-out.
To me this fits under the game sense category. I don’t think these are really a linear progression. It’s absolutely possible to get much better at “game sense” as a way of compensating for aim that isn’t that great. At high levels, you’ll see pros who can take out cheaters with an aim bot because they know enough about the maps and angles and game mechanics to overcome perfect aim and reaction time.
sometimes it's stuff that's just weird esoteric game mechanics - like for a very long time the distance you stand from a corner while peeking will determine if the enemy can see you before you see them. You will never learn that unless someone just tells you.
Just play fun games at your skill level, and/or play with friends. It’s all about having fun. Don’t try to get into competitive games right from the start. Or if you feel like you can, join a team at your level.
Oh no, I never meant to get into it competitively. I don't get much joy out of that. But it'd be nice to have a PvP shooter I could screw around in every so often. CoD kind of used to be that for me, but it's both gone in a direction I don't enjoy and doesn't work well on Linux due to anti-cheat.
Try TF2! It's super fun and not competitive at all. Sure, its a little gimmicky but most of the players are in it for a good time and don't mind messing around a bit.
Those help but they are definitely not required. CS is fundamentally a game about first aiming skill (which you have to train) and reflexes, and then with skill becomes a game about strategy and map knowledge. Obviously at the highest levels you're not getting very far on a $5 mouse and a 60FPS monitor but you can get about halfway up up the ranks before it starts being a problem.
Just mouse should be sufficient. Back in 2015 I managed to get up to DMG rank on Macbook with a decent Razer mouse.
Now you can get gaming mouse with a good sensor for ~20 eur.
I reccomend playing arms race to get good at the mechanics of it. Constant fighting, a lot of fun, and if you're not good at moving and aiming you'll get good because it's constant practice.
I've played the beta for about 30hrs. I'm really enjoying it.
The new grenades work so much better. Smokes can give you a small peek, flash grenades feel more fair, molotovs have the right mix of cluttering the view and preventing progress.
Also love small details lile the shading being very dull during the buy time, and likening up when the round starts.
The game feels very tight, and less likely to rely on exploits ("put the smoke on this pixel and crouch here so you can see them!") than before.
On a minor note, I wish Valve's reporting system was a bit more friendly. They could take some UX lessons or two from Overwatch.
Sorry to comment just on one singular aspect but...
85 GB of free storage listed as minimum system requirement?
Granted, I haven't seriously played any major games for at least 10 years I'd say. My occasional playing is limited in time and scope and usually involves reliving some old titles... is this really a new normal? We're also not talking about a big MMORPG with an incredibly wide world... Counter Strike is still a FPS you play on small maps right?
(edit: I just rechecked to make sure it doesn't say 8.5 GB, which would have also seemed a lot to me... I'm really getting old)
RAGE, a game from 2011 takes 25 GB, with compression and blurry graphics. DOOM (2016) is 55GB and Doom Eternal is 80GB.
The reason: huge textures, where every detail is unique and that look good up close. Let's say you map the world at a millimeter scale, let's a byte per mm2, 1GB is 1000m2, which is about the size of a typical backyard, small maps are bigger than that, have a bunch of them and you can get to tens of GB easily. Plus textures are not just colors. Normals, material properties, etc... are mapped to textures too.
I don't know how Counter-Strike 2 gets to 85GB, but if you want things to look good up close and avoid repetition you get these sizes. Also, storage is cheap, so if it makes the game look better, why not use it?
Halo Infinite is around 50gb but has compressed textures and audio so it can fit on a blueray disk for Xbox One (the third xbox). It's a very cookie-cutter game and also far far smaller on biomes compared to previous halo games (I think it's only 2-3: mountain grasslands, and desert on a multiplayer map, and interiors if together you want to call them a biome).
PC games will tend not to use compressed textures and audio so the games load faster (they don't need to spend time decompressing) so they can easily reach 85gb. Faster loads is more important in games where there are many matches.
Borderlands 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare are about 135gb.
ARK is the poster child of unoptimized messes, though. It might be a bad example.
Someone hit me with the trivia: How big was Titanfall 1 initially, with its library of totally uncompressed audio for every localization in the base install?
Ark Survival Evolved ?
Base game should be around 135GB, and you don't have to install all the different maps at the same time since you won't be switching between them frequently.
If you want to run a dedicated server on top of that, those are around 25GB per map, so it is not that crazy I think.
No idea. I am just reporting what I saw when I clicked "install" for her. I'm not into survival games so I don't play it, I just know I was stunned at the requirement and that she had to remove other games to fit it on her PC's SSD.
High quality models, textures, animations and more takes a lot of space, like a lot a lot.
But, I just installed CS2 and I think it only downloaded about 20GB or so, that maybe decompresses to about 40GB in the end. Maybe someone else can verify what it ended up taking on disk?
That's a lot of high def textures, yep. Every (base) gun, user model, map. If you'd asked me over/under on 90 gigs I'd have really struggled to guess right.
Thanks for the number. Why do they inflate the disk space needed by a factor of ~2.5 I wonder...
I understand you would want to have some leeway so someone playing the game doesn't surpass the 'disk space required' within the first three days just because of a few additional maps/skins/textures downloaded while playing... but over 50 gb of leeway given an install size of 33.6 gb?
Maybe pointing towards something else about gaming I don't understand...
This has been an incredible year for gaming already but even more so for classic series. So far we've seen a new Zelda, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Balder's Gate and Counter-Strike come out. The last time this happened was back in 2000.
Sequels of sequels are hardly a good thing for gaming. Maybe I was spoiled, but in the '80s/'90s we'd get multiple genre- creating titles every year or so. As good as these sequels are, they're not creating any new genre.
Wasn't it easier to create new genres back when there weren't many yet? In the 80s you were lucky to get hundreds of games a decade. Now we get that in a week. But there are still many innovative indie games.
The sequels still sometimes offer cool things. BG3 is a very big change from BG2, as much as Divinity Original Sin is different from Divinity 2. It's not like the Calls of Duty.
But granted, that's an exception. Diablo 4 is a soulless cash grab. Payday 3 was a bust.
But there are still plenty of innovative games these days that create new or hybrid genres. Bridge Constructor. Portal. Slay the Spire. Frostpunk. Guitar Hero. Dead Cell. Firewatch. Braid. Human Fall Flat. Among Us. Superhot. Stanley Parable. Viewfinder. Rocket League. Surgeon Simulator. Overcooked. Soooo much more...
I wish FF[1] had fared better, but it was too late, especially with TF2 coming as an official title.
There is TF2C[2], but I have yet to try that one. Interestingly, it's still going strong with relatively recent content updates[3]. I'll give it a try, but at first pass, the gameplay appears to deviate too far towards TF2 and away from TFC.
I know that the Mac gaming crowd isn't huge but this bums me out. My MacBook Pro and MacBook Air were both completely sufficient for playing games when my gaming PC was inaccessible and CS was one of those games. It's a shame they seem to have killed it. :(
It ran via proton during beta but VAC did not allow playing on Valve servers. Now there is also a proper Linux version. Though I am not getting any sound for some reason. I'm sure there will be a fix soon.
Now I only hope for the Wayland "allow tearing" feature for disabling of vsync to actually be able to properly play it on Linux. It is merged everywhere (wayland, xwayland, mesa, etc.) but I know Gnome will be the last to implement it, maybe in a couple years time. They can't even merge the variable refresh rate patches which have been waiting for years. :(
Interesting, I find it quite playable without on 160Hz! I use gamescope to make it slightly better feeling. I'm also on Sway/wlroots - fairly minimal, but still sync-happy.
Have you tried gamescope out, perhaps the '--immediate-flips' argument? That suggests it may lead to/allow tearing - or does it depend on what you're waiting for?
Check audio settings. There are selection for audio output (Settings Menu -> Audio -> Audio Device). I didn't have any sound but selecting anything else than "Default Device" worked.
I love a numbered series but if you are going to use numbers, use them in sequence. This is Counter-Strike 5.
Counter-Strike (2000)
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (2004)
Counter-Strike: Source (2005) (that one is a port to Source really)
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012)
Counter-Strike 2 (2023)
I suppose this is not as bad as Battlefield 1, the tenth game in the Battlefield series... released after Battlefield 2, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4.
There's also Neo, Online, CS-CZ Deleted Scenes, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some, because I have bought the pack back the day, and it had like 6 titles.
Counter-Strike: Neo was an arcade game I think, Counter-Strike: Online (and Counter-Strike: Online Zombies) and Counter-Strike: Online 2 were both reworks for the Asian market, Deleted Scenes was the single player bundled with Condition Zero and off on a tangent was Tactical Intervention which was a similar game made by Counter-Strike's original creator.
I stopped playing multiplayer shooters a long long time ago but I started with CS when it was HL mod on LAN parties with friends and later played CS source. And I was a server admin for my clan so I know about tickrate.
Many years later I tried Hunt Showdown and this is the first time I heard of server side kill resolution. That leads to a insane number of trades where both people die in the game and it also can lead to people killing you after you killed them (that is on your screen anyway).
But what made me really skeptical about this was the how this opens up so much for cheaters, and Hunt did indeed have lots of cheater issues but I am not sure if it was all related to that. I think its more common these days Valorant also has server side kill resolving?
So this seems like a new technique the is like both combined to me but this is just my quick guess, but still this makes me super skeptical because if the client can just claim "I did this at this millisecond" how can the server verify that its all legit?
Playing Escape from Tarkov is fun. The server tick is higher than the player tick. AI use the server tick (since they are on the server) so AI bosses will often shoot you one time on your screen and then the death screen will show you received 6 or 7 bullet wounds which killed you in an instant. Server ticked and the AI fired for long enough that when the server finally updates your client you receive all the extra tick info at once. Barely see the boss? He saw you for long enough to instagib you.
Some players will also be convinced that you're cheating if you play the game really really well, and they will get upset. CS:GO (now CS2) has a very fascinating way of determining if someone is cheating. A ML based heuristic that is constantly being retrained, that can accurately judge whether someone is actually cheating or not based off their Overwatch (not the game) replay system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
Or they could ignore the people crying about cheaters because they lost.
I was previously SMFC. People love to call cheats way more often than people actually cheat im that game. People cannot fathom simply being worse, or they cannot emotionally handle it.
No, they should not add kernel level malware to the game.
My experience is that there were tons of cheaters in the middle, most populated ranks, and it cleared up at Global, or at least the cheats were subtle.
I am certain of this because I climbed to global a few times, and I was tracking VAC bans in my game history. In the top ranks, every other game eventually had a player get VAC ban days or weeks later. In the middle ranks it was one or more players every game.
However the cheaters bothered me less than having to play the team's therapist in every game the moment we lost one round!
In my experience, at lower levels you’re more likely to see cheaters spinning like a tornado landing headshots immediately on anyone who pops into view. At higher levels you’re more likely to find people toggling on cheats only for clutch game moments. They are objectively good players, but use cheats tactically to get that last bit of boost. One of these is far easier to detect and ban. So it can give the impression there are fewer cheaters at high levels. I’m not convinced that’s the case.
I check the VAC history of my matchmaking player history every once in a while. Not a single cheater in nearly a decade. There are two plausible explanations.
1. Cheating is not at all common.
2. Cheaters have low trust factor and you never see them if you don't have a low trust factor.
In either case I'm not very bothered. Don't put malware on my computer because some players haven't spent enough time in the game yet.
I mean, cheating is likely to be an actual problem. Not that it justifies the malware, but there is a real problem even if that's not a reasonable solution.
It's not a question of if it's a problem. People do cheat, and that is a problem. It's a question of how much of a problem it is. What percentage of games have cheaters in them? I would bet there are several orders of magnitude difference between that number, and the percentage of games where someone cries cheater.
I agree. Paraphrasing Clarke, any sufficiently skilled player is indistinguishable from a cheater. And this is the charitable version too. Often participants just use whatever to hurt the other party - if they are not able via game mechanics, they will resort to reporting. It's how players are raking up Griefing reports in Rainbow 6 Siege's last update. I barely played some hours, and never griefed, yet still got some.
Looking previews this past year. I don't like how clean all the maps look. One thing the Source versions of the game did well is it made the areas feel lived in and sometimes dirty.
I hope this can be improved on in future updates with CS2.
If nothing else, the new update at least allows CS:GO to launch on my Linux machine. It had been broken for some time, despite having a native Linux build.
I think/hope so - based on the Dota 2 move to Source 2, the game code (rather than the engine code) stayed pretty similar - I assume Valve have maintained the engine <-> game interfaces.
The developer in me find it weird that they didn't make a new database record for this internally.